


flight and the engines of change

by apisdn



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aviation, Draco Malfoy in the Muggle World, Science, but he did get hit, this is that part, you remember the part where he was bragging about nearly being hit by a helicopter?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:53:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21951016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apisdn/pseuds/apisdn
Summary: Remember when Draco Malfoy bragged about nearly being knocked out of the sky by a helicopter while flying his broom?Here's the story of what would happen if it was more than 'nearly'
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Aviation, Draco Malfoy/Science, Draco Malfoy/bitchiness
Comments: 8
Kudos: 97





	flight and the engines of change

**Author's Note:**

> originally a response to a prompt on reddit written by me. (seriously I'm not stealing it)  
> https://www.reddit.com/r/HPfanfiction/comments/e6ysu3/prompt_draco_malfoy_lose_prompt_after/

Draco flies his broom a lot, always near his house, and even though his Mother tells him not to go outside the wards he always does. There are odd muggle contraptions that fly over sometimes, and hills to fly through and interesting places to see.

He has no way of knowing it, but the Malfoy manor in Wiltshire was right near [MOD Boscombe Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOD_Boscombe_Down), a testing ground for military aircraft and a flight school. And he knows what a helicopter is, he asked, and he finds them curious and odd. So he skirts around, flitting near-about to look at what these muggles are up to.

Then there's a young pilot in the school, who's not quite up to scratch and Draco, who even in canon was about as Gryffindor as a Slytherin could get, and they almost hit each other and Draco goes down. Perhaps in some universes he swerves away and later tells the tale to a riveted group of first years before their first flying class. Maybe there are universes where it re-confirms everything his father ever said about brutish muggles. This isn't one of them. In this one, Draco falls. And hits his head, because even Wizards get knocked out when you hit them on the head and accidental magic doesn't always happen.

So the statute is a bit destroyed, and the pilot is panicking about that (broomstick!?), but it's really much less important to him than the child who looks to be hovering somewhere around the edge of nine and just took a swan dive onto a rock from thirty feet in the air. (The broomstick went off into the bushes and isn't retrieved). So he lands his chopper, grabs the kid, and tries to wake him up while his trainer flies them back to base.

Now, obviously he reports to his superiors about magic, but there's no proof, it goes nowhere, and strange things happen sometimes. Besides, what would the government even do? There really aren't any agencies in the UK that deal with that sort of thing and if there were they'd be the provenance of someone with a clearance far higher than an officer running a school for test pilots. So that's still not as important as the kid in med-bay who just woke up.

He has a concussion, but they're all more worried than they should be because while he can tell them his name (Draco Malfoy), the date (June 12) and what happened right up to the moment of the crash (I was playing outside. I fell. There was a rock), he has no idea who the prime minister is (the what?) or what the name of the Queen is (how should I know?). So that's really concerning, and they need to get him in an MRI or something, but even more worrying is the fact that Draco doesn't know his parents phone number so they have no way of getting him back where he belongs.

Draco meanwhile is freaking out and also excited. On the one hand, these muggles are nothing like he was taught, very interesting, and so smart (they have machines to scan brains without magic! and the orderly assigned to keep him awake (because concussion) is telling him about how helicopters work which he's wanted to know for years), but on the other hand, he's lost and alone in a strange place, has no way of getting his parents (he doesn't know what a 'phone' is and Malfoy Manor has been unplottable since it was built in 1067 so there's no muggle address, and he doesn't have an owl or a floo or a wand) and also his head hurts. A lot. He can't break the statute, which means he just has to shut up and nod along or not answer (and he can't talk down to them or call them 'filthy muggles'--which at this point he doesn't want to do because they're honestly the nicest people he's ever met outside of his parents). He can't really do anything. So he sits and listens and three hours later ends up in a hospital in a larger city, and gets MRIs and X-Rays and reads the books he's given and gets his broken leg in a cast (something he'd like to do without) and takes his medicine (something he wouldn't like to do without) and acts curious and gets told all about how everything works. He figures out what a phone is eventually, and three days later when Lucius Malfoy has gotten the Minister to get the Prime Minister to figure out where he is, he's sitting in his bed watching a television show about how the Tube works and running his fingers over the x-rays of his broken leg and ribs like they're the most fascinating thing he's ever seen.

Everyone is obliviated, and Draco goes home (a little sad because the phone number of the boy in the next room over he made friends with is useless now), but he keeps his x-ray printouts, the Walkman that used to belong to his nurses brother, and a burning desire to know how cathode ray tubes work. At the next society event, Theo Nott calls muggles 'barely better than pigs swimming in their own filth', and he has to bite his tongue not to tell him about Miss Therry who comforted him through the three strangest nights of his life and gave him her brothers Walkman so he could listen to something other than beeping and shuffling all night.

The next day, he sneaks out of the wards, right up to the point where electric devices start working again, and listens to all three of his tapes over and over. His father finds him after a few hours, a little worried because he went missing just a few days before, but being asked not to leave again isn't enough to deter him from using his new favorite toy, and a few days in the Malfoy library later he's fairly certain that Wafflings Theory of Magical Fields is talking about the same thing as that interesting telly program about magnets, and maybe that's why his Walkman doesn't work. Which is a problem because The Pasadenas are far superior to Celestina Warbeck and Draco Malfoy likes getting what he wants.

Eventually, he waits for a day his parents are gone and takes a trip into the nearest muggle town. There's a public library and within three hours he's back home, Walkman wrapped in an improvised wire Faraday Cage and Pasadenas turned up to full volume. Draco Malfoy gets what he wants, even if he has to get it for himself.

Two years later, the Hat dithers over a head full of schematics and fascination, a child who looks up when the test planes fly over and wonders how to make them faster with magic, Ravenclaw except for a burning ambition to make it happen and the sneakiness to get away with regular trips to a muggle town. Wandless confundus and notice-me-nots, clandestine currency changes at Gringotts, an expanded trunk with an illegally enchanted Macintosh 128K. A library card and a secret stash of Muggle schoolbooks. All these things the hat sees and considers for a longer time than any other Malfoy before him.

"Such a mind. You'd do well in Ravenclaw, but in Slytherin too. You certainly have the cunning for it." says the hat.

"Slytherin please, like my family." says the boy under it.

The hat raises a mental eyebrow. "I try not to sort based on family." it says.

"Still Slytherin." says the boy. "I'm going to change the world."

And that is the most Slytherin way of being, so of course he gets in.

After that, things get on at Hogwarts as they normally do. Draco Malfoy does not befriend Harry Potter, or associate with muggleborns. He loves his father, but he fears him, and now more than ever it is important that none of his secrets are discovered. Still, he's happier. In this universe his social experiences are more than just long stretches of his parents, tutors, and house elves interspersed with Society events. He also has long afternoons of footie in the fields around Amesbury and a spotty attendance at the local young aviators club to fall back on, so everyone gets along, he doesn't antagonize people unnecessarily, and Harry Potter & Co barely even know his name.

Quirrel dies, Lockhart flounces, Dementors are a serious barrier to decent study, the Tournament is terrifying and the location of Hogwarts is a serious barrier to accessing the burgeoning internet. Draco finds out that he likes programming, ancient runes, prog rock, and pretty boys with crooked smiles. He also still loves aviation, but we already knew that. He does nothing about any of those likes though until just before fifth year, because secret keeping is second nature, and it isn't time to act.

Then, suddenly, it is, and he's frantically preparing for when things reach the point of no return.

Umbrage takes over the school, and Voldemort comes back, and Draco knows that he has maybe a year before things get really bad. He also knows that running away isn't an option yet. He isn't a Gryffindor, but if he leaves now he won't be able to keep the name and influence that makes his ambitions something he can see and not an impossibility. Without the name Malfoy he's no better a force of change than Arthur Weasley and he knows it. Without OWLs and NEWTs he's even less.

It's not a good time to be Draco Malfoy. (his father hates muggles, wants the worlds separate, and he agrees on some points because he learned about bombs and fighter jets along with helicopters and doesn't think that integration would work, but at the same time he rails against the inefficiency of the more backwards institutions of his world, and against limitations of magic that can be overcome with technology.) Still, he does his best to further his goals. He quietly warns the DA about Umbrage and her plans, gets in just good enough with both Umbrage and Potter that he'll come out of either side of the conflict smelling like roses, and builds a one man glider propelled with the same runic matrices as a broom but with much better aerodynamics and a more efficient method of control than shoving magic against the direction you want to go. It beats wizarding airspeed records by a factor of three.

He also quietly has muggle papers forged, signs up for the GCSEs, and studies like mad. He will not be fighting in the next war on either side, even if he has to leave his whole world behind him. Contingencies are important.

That summer, Draco watches the planes from the airbase fly overhead, as he always has. Sometimes there are helicopters, and he smiles because they remind him that there's more to the world than madmen who want to conquer it. He gathers information on everything he can, and the night before he's supposed to go out and murder a muggle family to become worthy of receiving the mark, he boards a train going into London and doesn't look back. He has 12 OWL's and a hundred Galleons, and everyone he leaves behind thinks he will be found easily with those as his only resources. What they don't expect is that he also has about a thousand pounds smuggled out of his trust fund and an A in every subject on the GCSE's, and that's what will give him an edge.

That year Draco gets a job in a Chinese restaurant as a dishwasher, a tiny flat shared with three strangers, and an enrollment in a school with an accelerated program for his A-levels. He casts exactly three spells the entire year, (all confundus, all wandless, and all to ease the procurement of the flat and schooling), and uses his trunk as a coffee table.

He goes to Diagon alley twice. The first time is to mail an offer to Dumbledore. His family fortune and name at the end of the war in exchange for all the information he has, all of it legally binding and tied up with no loopholes. The second time is to mail the information and to deposit the agreement in his safety deposit box at Gringotts. That is the entirety of his participation in the war. He will not take the mark, but he also refuses to raise his wand against his parents. (at the post office he nearly breaks, so close to mailing them but he can't give any sign of where he is. He misses them badly.)

What would have been Draco's seventh year at Hogwarts he spends at Cambridge University. It took five confundus' that time to make them ignore his complete lack of school records, but his test scores are flawless and in the end he gets in on his own merit. He even gets fairly decent financial aid, which is good, because even though he was promoted to line cook and occasional busboy before he left London he still isn't working with much in the way of resources.

Despite the war, the horrible updates on the Wizarding Wireless, and the lack of magic (though he's got several other wandless spells now too), it's one of the best years of his life. He studies everything he can get his hands on, double majored in Aerospace and Electrical Engineering, scribbles ideas for magical improvements in notebooks he shows no one, and makes Chinese food, because it's all he knows how to cook and he can rarely afford takeout. This time he works in a rare books shop with very few patrons where he can spend his shift mostly studying.

All his days are taken up with programming, ancient runes, aviation, and pretty boys with crooked smiles. He's free to make the friends he wants, learn what he wants, and dream of changing the world.

The next summer, the war is over and Hogwarts letters go out again. Students who missed seventh year are free to come back and try again. Draco considers it, but refuses. He'll show up for NEWTs (and that will be more studying, won't it) but until then he has more important things to think about.

In fact, the next time he sees another wizard after NEWTs taken impersonally at the ministry is his college graduation. He wasn't expecting anyone, of course, but there in the third row sits Narcissa Malfoy, looking uncomfortable and old fashioned and proud in a confused sort of way. He takes her back to the apartment he moved into when he left the dorms junior year, and makes her stir fry for dinner. While they eat it, she stares at him in wonderment, her son who came out of the war mostly untouched and happy and listening to music and kissing pretty boys with crooked smiles. She hasn't talked to him in years, but really there's only one thing she wants to know.

"How on earth," she asks eventually, after dinner, as they sit on the sofa and he tells her about his life now "did you end up so far from what was expected? I can't help but wonder at you ending up... here."

Draco smiles, and glances over at photos of himself and his friends and his cat, his class of 2001 sweatshirt, his tape deck stacked with music he likes, his senior thesis on computer control systems in aircraft and other large machinery--all the evidence that he is happy and alive and going to change the world. "Do you remember," he says, "when I was knocked out of the sky by a helicopter?"

His mother takes his hand. "How could I forget."

"Well," he says, "It was the best thing that ever happened to me."


End file.
